This week, the telehealth firm Cerebral, which rose to prominence in the early stages of the epidemic, admitted to sharing the personal information of more than 3.1 million American patients with social media platforms and marketers including as Google, Meta, and TikTok. Since it started running in October 2019, Cerebral has been employing "pixels," tracking scripts that businesses like Meta sell to third-party developers for advertising purposes, to gather user data
Cerebral "found that it had released certain information that may have been classified as protected health information under [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act]" following a recent evaluation of its software. Names, phone numbers, birth dates, and insurance information are among the details Freely exchanged. In certain cases, the business could have also disclosed data it had gathered from the mental health self-assessment forms patients had to fill out in order to book counselling appointments and use other services. It did not divulge social security numbers, bank account information, or credit card details, claims Cerebral.
Cerebral claims that after realising the error, it "disabled, altered and/or erased" the tracking pixels that had exposed the data. To further reduce the possibility of sharing such information in the future, "we have improved our information security standards and technological screening processes." Cerebral is being looked into by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The Federal Trade Commission penalised cheap prescription app GoodRx $1.5 million for exchanging patient information with Meta and Google before the data vulnerability was made public. The government reached a $7.8 million settlement with the online counselling company BetterHelp earlier this month and stated that it was attempting to ban the business from exchanging health information for ad targeting.
Follow Us